Every company must offer excellent products and services and build enduring customer relationships to attract clients.
Why it’s essential to create an exceptional customer experience?
Customers don’t wake up one day and start complimenting a brand on social media or raving about it at a dinner party. Customers take time and deliberate actions from the brand to reach that point. To keep customers in touch, businesses must emphasize customer lifecycle management.
Customer lifecycle marketing is a powerful and effective way to develop a marketing strategy. It places the needs and expectations of prospects and customers at the center of the messages disseminated by the brand. Read the article to learn more about customer lifecycle marketing, stages, and automation needs.
What is Customer Lifecycle?
The customer life cycle refers to the different stages and events that will punctuate a customer’s relationship with a company.
Like a conversion tunnel, it allows you to know at what stage a customer is in his relationship with the company:
- How long has he been a customer?
- Does he buy regularly?
- Is he faithful?
- Is he completely inactive? etc.
Depending on the stage in which your customers are, you will be able to adapt your strategy in a relevant way, optimize their experience and promote their progress.
“The key to success in CLM is behind optimizing for Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and not conversion rate (CR) or revenue per visit (RPV). This is not to say conversion rate doesn’t have its place – it’s a very important metric in the right scenario. However, the hierarchy is important. CLV trumps all others as a metric for long-term profitability.” –Edward Gotham, Ometria
Stages Of Customer Lifecycle
For the marketer, managing the customer life cycle is structured in 4 main phases:
- It’s all about attracting prospects,
- To engage them,
- To make prospects buy for the first time,
- Then to satisfy them so that they buy again and become ambassadors.
Here are the details about the 4 stages of customer lifecycle management:
1. Discovery
The customer becomes aware of your existence and begins his customer journey, which will be the first of a long series with a bit of luck. Your customer may have heard about your business through a social media post, advertisement, or friend recommendation.
2. Consideration
Consider a purchase. At this point, businesses can help potential customers in several ways: by building a robust knowledge base, offering a chat to answer questions, and providing information through webinars, blog posts, or other marketing materials. to facilitate their transition to the next stage. The key here is customer engagement.
3. Purchase
The purchase stage must be as simple as possible. It should offer plenty of payment options and minimize the time lag between customers clicking “buy” and receiving the confirmation email. This notably involves clear communication on prices and the product return and refund policy.
As soon as someone interacts with you, either by creating an account or making a purchase, they become part of your company’s relationship management (CRM). This data can be used to develop your future marketing strategy or refine the buyer experience.
Your top 10% of most loyal customers spend three times as much on each order as your lower 90% of customers, and your top 1% of customers spend five times as much as the lower 90%.
4. Retention
Retention marks the beginning of real relational work, work that impacts today’s turnover but also that of tomorrow. Send a follow-up email to your customers to thank them for choosing your business and ensure they can get help soon after their purchase. Also, don’t forget to send them offers or discounts on items viewed or complementary to their first purchase to entice them to come back to you. And make sure all interactions logged in a CRM system are viewable by both marketing and customer support teams.
Retention marks the beginning of true relationship work. According to a report from Forbes, Just 20% of your current consumers will account for 80% of your future profits.
Retention is about keeping the conversation going with customers and using data to anticipate what they might need at each stage of the lifecycle. For a financial institution, this means anticipating when a client might be looking for a house, a new car, or a loan to finance his studies or his holidays. For a clothing store, it is a question of adequately informing the customer about the new services and new collections available.
Customer Lifecycle Email Marketing
Although it’s not the only channel available, email marketing is the best for lifecycle marketing.
Why?
Long-term success in terms of profitability is ensured by tailoring your emails to the customer life cycle management. In fact, using the customer life cycle as a benchmark for your mailings can help you better understand your target and enable you to send the appropriate message at the appropriate time.
Automation Is The Key To Real-Time Response
In life cycle management, the right timing is essential. You need to interact with your prospect at the right time. Only automation can do that because a human marketer will never be able to respond to opportunities as quickly and with the same precision as software powered by artificial intelligence.
Sending a simple monthly newsletter is a static approach devoid of any customization. However, with an automation system, marketers can decide which customer behaviors will trigger which events. Every click on a newsletter article, every abandoned cart, and every occasion a customer browses your website should trigger an automated response.
Wrapping Up
Previously, marketing had to rely on intuition or guesswork. Some messages hit their target, but most were missed. But today, with the growth of automation powered by artificial intelligence, marketers have a set of tools at their disposal to nurture and engage every customer at every stage of their lifecycle.
